Using a Field to Display Status Information

One disadvantage of the gotoNetPage command is that once it executes, your Director movie has no way to know whether the action succeeded. Director simply sends a message through the computer's operating system to the Web browser, telling it to launch and to navigate to a specific URL or file. Director then steps out of the picture. Many things could go wrong: the Web browser might not be present or it might not launch, the connection to the Internet might fail, the URL might not be found, and so on. Even if the Web browser launches and displays the requested Web page successfully, your Director movie has no way of knowing this.

In such a situation, there is no fully satisfactory way to provide feedback to your users. In this task, you will implement a modest form of feedback by displaying messages in the Status field on the Order panel. The initial message, which says "Waiting…,"will be replaced by the message "Launching your Web browser…" when users click the Order Now button.